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Few things are as quintessentially American as the mythos surrounding the West. Manifest destiny, the romance of wide open plains and broken landscapes, get rich quick schemes, and old-fashioned wandering. Cass McCombs’ seventh full-length album, Big Wheel and Others, takes root in this fertile soil of Americana, crafting a sprawling cosmology out of its characters from the past two centuries. When I interviewed McCombs in 2011 around the time of Wit’s End, he confessed a fixation on northern California’s history of “drugs, gunslingers, and gold.” Where he took this fixation two years later reveals all one needs to know about the wry, reclusive singer-songwriter.

Wheel opens with a child’s voice, blithely talking about his drug use. This turns out to be an audio clip from Sean, a 1969 documentary about a 4-year-old raised by Haight-Ashbury hippies. In McCombs’ mind Sean isn’t a tragic figure, however, but a stand-in for the unregulated San Francisco of the acid-testing 1960s. For McCombs, Sean’s creepily unregulated upbringing aligns with a broader history of the Wild West, like the Gold Rush’s ruthless Barbary Coast district from a century earlier, and the shiftless drifters populating highway on-ramps and truck stops to this day.

An eight-minute run on Side 2 encapsulates much of Wheel’s own mythology. In another edited movie clip, after solidly affirming that “there’s no God around,” because “the whole world is the Indians’ world,” Sean is prompted for his thoughts on America. “You know America,” he replies. “Half of the world.” For McCombs, such a naïve assertion isn’t cause to rail against patriotic chauvinism, but a perfect segue into the languid Roger McGuinn-style folk-rock of “Home on the Range”. An original composition, “Range” references the 19th century ode to life in Kansas, rumbling with cattle and surrounded by the infinite horizons of what at the time was the American West—and for residents, the entire world. The idea that Sean in 1969 shares a shrunken worldview with a Romantic 1870s rancher is not lost on McCombs. Much of Wheel emanates from this notion: the size of one’s world, and the shape of one’s belief system, equates to imagination plus experience.

Appropriately for an album with such broad aims, Wheel itself is sprawling. With an 85-minute runtime, it covers most most of the musical themes and narrative fixations McCombs has drawn upon since his 2003 debut. Since that time, he’s quietly become one of America’s finest chroniclers of fringe characters, a writer of heart-rending love songs and psychedelic odes to the natural world, a teller of tall-tales with a sense of humor dry as desert wood, and that rare folksinger who actually sings about the folk. Over the last decade, McCombs has been a remarkably consistent, if not publicity-averse, singer-songwriter, comparable to Bill Callahan and Will Oldham as our foremost translators of Old, Weird America into modern terms (and vice-versa). Appropriately, then, the lead character of “Range” is not taken with the beauty of his surroundings, but in a milder form of lawnessness. “I believe in littering,” he croons to open the song. “Waste should not be hidden, but seen.”

Musically, McCombs mixes light and dark in a similar way. His songs are often cast with an eerie serenity, emanating both from his soft vocals and fondness for guitar-led arrangements that glide between sections. His songs are often very pretty, though always invested with a palpable, if not quite visible, sense of foreboding. This befits the characters of Wheel, most of whom are alone—some desperately so—and seeking redemption, if not simply trying to prove something to themselves. A sweet, loping love song is set between a couple “broken down for days at a free motel/ under the Oregon ridge.” On the brooding lament “My Name Written in Water”, McCombs trails a character escaping the suburbs for time spent amongst the ancient majesty of Utah mesas. Quoting Hamlet’s time-worn soliloquy on mortality, he’s concerned not with where to get gas, but with how the words he’s writing will represent him after he’s gone.

Elsewhere, McCombs packs the album full of outsize, masculine characters in the mold of “Lionkiller”. Early along the tracklist is the swaggering trucker of “Big Wheel” who bags lot lizards and spouts idioms like bumper stickers (“A man is bolts, a man is rust/ For a little while, then the man is dust”). There’s “Joe Murder”, a Coen Brothers-style telling of “Cortez the Killer”, on which McCombs uncoils a sinister guitar lead grumbling with intensity, while shaping the titular drug-runner through his personality quirks. Joe Murder “cut with milk sugar, to eliminate cost,” to which McCombs adds: “such a frugal drifter.” Then there’s the shit-talking narrator of “Satan is My Toy”, letting loose a series of randy, schoolyard-quality couplets, eliding curse word punchlines and relying on the listener to fill in the blanks. It’s McCombs in Nick Cave drag, and the kind of song you’d expect to hear pour out of a biker bar when a fight erupts into the alley through the front doors.

These songs have more muscle than the typical McCombs song, with “Wheel” chugging like V-12 pistons, and “Satan” smoldering with sticky saxophone smears. This befits their subject matter as well as the vibe of the album, on which McCombs plays with genre more explicitly than usual. This wide-ranging approach seems to be one of Wheel’s guiding principles, only once resulting in an eyebrow-raising inclusion, whenhalfway through the album he drops a fairly inexplicable three-and-a-half minute jazz-rock instrumental. Coming from McCombs, who ended PREfection with six-plus minutes of ambient car-alarm and then opened Dropping the Writ two years later with the same sound fading out, such a move should be expected, if not honored. Likely he’s giving us an intermission.

As taken as he is with the American West as a stark, limitless canvas for his characters to make their own, it’s likely McCombs has an affinity for Bobby Dupea, the volatile, shiftless oil-well rigger from 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Dupea has everything he could want, but discards it all in fits of selfishness and unacknowledged confusion as he drives from California to Washington. Foremost among those left behind is Dupea’s girlfriend Rayette Dipesto, a Tammy Wynette-worshipping waitress and the film’s saddest character. Karen Black was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Rayette, though it’s likely that a generation discovered her 40 years later, through her haunting vocals on Catacombs’ “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”.

Black died this past August, and McCombs not only dedicated Wheel to her memory, but gave her the lead on the second of the album’s two versions of “Brighter!” Musically, the song bears mid-tempo similarities to the Orbisonian theater of “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”, though it differs thematically. At once, “Brighter!” is a spiritual invocation and a melancholy tale of a directionless life. “I stopped in for a little while, and learned a host of sins,” Black sings in her highest register. “I wandered off a little while, because you can never win.” Somewhere within the 74-year-old Black’s delivery on this couplet lies a strong hint as to McCombs’ complex moral universe: if you stop moving too long, you won’t like what you learn.